MarketHive Celebrates LinkedIn’s Acquisition

When I read about the purchase of LinkedIn by Microsoft I had a great deal of interest in the matter since I have been working with LinkedIn for some time to take advantage of the same data M$ found valuable as a motive for their acquisition, but from the perspective of acquainting as wide a segment of LI subscribers as possible to the very real practicality of marrying social with a customer-centric marketing platform which is data driven, offers tremendous value as a global marketing solution in acquisition of customers rather than product promotion, but also with world class product marketing.

This portion of a news article really interested me: “The richness of LinkedIn's data is absolutely the driver. They've amassed over 400 million profiles, and what's valuable is that it's very high-quality data: It's added by the users themselves; it hasn't been scraped off the web; it's accurate and up-to-date. That's really the basis of the value around LinkedIn. And among other things, they've also created a very vibrant jobs marketplace. There are so many applications of the data and now Microsoft will be able to take advantage of that.” This reminded me that the data a MarketHive subscriber gets from their signups is very high quality, maybe not so much as LinkedIn, but such that the profiles we get are the list dreams are made of.

The author went on to say: “LinkedIn opened the way for professional or business uses around social, and the Microsoft acquisition really legitimizes that there's a lot of value in collecting profiles and applying that to meaningful business use. Social isn't just for sharing photos and updates with family and friends; this concept of social and business connections are very valuable on the professional side.” This is the exact nature of the MarketHive paradigm, “collecting profiles and applying that to meaningful business use.”

“I do believe that LinkedIn started a trend. And there are some natural fits between some social networking companies and some other big companies. LinkedIn helped to show those interesting opportunities around Mergers &Acquisitions, interesting potential pairings between social companies and perhaps more established companies who haven't gotten into the space and need something in their portfolio to shore up a perceived gap. The acquisition is a major milestone for social networking and certainly for LinkedIn in particular,” he said. This is such sweet music to a not insubstantial player like MarketHive whose goal is exactly to pair social companies with an unparalleled marketing portfolio so there is no gap between social networking, customers and sales.

The question was asked, “How do you think LinkedIn's products may change?”

The author continued: “Certainly, the two (LinkedIn) products are going to merge. I was one of the folks who did the first Outlook integration for LinkedIn, and there's been a lot of ideas around how to integrate LinkedIn more with Outlook and Microsoft Office as a whole. For all of that profile data to be used in email communications, it could make a lot of sense to bring all that social data to email, which is still the primary channel for business.” This is exactly the intention of MH whose email capabilities are five star, rock solid on Amazon servers, and scalable for any purpose whatsoever.

In recounting the history of LinkedIn he said, “LinkedIn started in late 2002 out of the ashes of the dot-com bust. At the time, pretty much everyone was checked out, investors especially. It was a rather dark time. Especially here in Silicon Valley – where people tend to move around a lot, and you're trying to maintain connections with contacts – there was no system for helping people keep track of each other, a platform where people can stay connected.

But we always felt that there was a basis for some very interesting applications on top of the data, so even in the early days, there was a concept of a platform and building vertical applications on top of it. One of those was the job marketplace that allows people to find potential employees and source candidates; another is the CRM/Sales Navigator product that was also based around this idea.” It almost seems that the references are to MarketHive which is far and away the leading player in this niche next to LinkedIn. Although our business model is somewhat different we fully embrace the ‘network effect’ mentioned in the article.

So, in conclusion, the only thing restraining the next big thing whose time has come is that MarketHive is carefully and effectively being coiffed for her debut as a major contender alongside of LinkedIn with a foundational CRM/ Sales Navigator product and a number of ‘vertical applications’, being carefully crafted and built to maturity as the complete fruition of social networking and real world product marketing built upon a customer-centric multi-faceted platform. What a sweet ride this is becoming!